Citing key feminist scholar, Orissa HC quashes rape case
The Orissa High Court quashed rape charges against a police sub-inspector, emphasizing consent's distinction from marriage and rejecting vengeance in justice.
When a relationship does not lead to marriage, it may be source of a personal hurt but is not a crime, the Orissa high court observed while quashing rape charges against a police sub-inspector accused by his former partner.
In dismissing the petition, justice Sanjeeb Panigrahi laid down two crucial aspects: one, the criminal justice system must be shielded from being turned into “an instrument of vengeance”. Two, upholding women’s sexual agency involves rejecting the notion that consent to intimacy automatically constitutes consent to marriage.
The case relates to a woman’s complaints against her former partner – including a civil suit as well as a criminal charge alleging rape on the promise of marriage. The woman had claimed she met the man in 2012 and maintained a relationship for nine years, which, she stated was against her will and involved torture.
The civil suit, to a family court in Sambalpur, sought the two be declared married and the man be prevented from marrying someone else as she claimed that the two had had wedding rituals at a temple in 2021 but the union was not registered. After the failed registration attempt, she filed the criminal complaint alleging rape. The man petitioned the court in 2024 to quash these proceedings.
The court noted the contradiction between the woman’s rape allegations based on false marriage promises and her civil suit claiming they were already married. Finding no evidence of coercion or deception at the relationship’s beginning, the court determined this was central to resolving the dispute.
“The fact that the relationship lasted nearly nine years shows it was voluntary, making the invocation of Section 376 questionable,” justice Panigrahi stated in the order. “The intervention of the court was imperative to shield the criminal justice system from being wielded as an instrument of vengeance for the collapse of a personal relationship.”
The judgment explored deeper philosophical terrain with Justice Panigrahi observing there is “an urgent need to disentangle the constructs of sex and marriage.” He elaborated that marriage in a patriarchal society “has been reduced to a mere performative act, reinforcing the notion that female sexuality must be bound to male commitment.”
“It is a legal construct, a deliberate compact between two individuals who elect to bind their futures together under the sanction of law. It is not the inexorable destination of passion, nor the predetermined consequence of intimacy,” the judge stated. “To conflate the two is to imprison human relationships within archaic expectations, to deny individuals, especially women, their right to autonomy, to choose, to the pursuit of desire unshackled by social decree.”
The judge invoked feminist theory, stating: “Feminist philosophy has long waged the battle against the tyranny of expectation, the insidious notion that a woman’s sexual agency is valid only when tethered to marriage.” He specifically referenced Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” which “unmasked the historical subjugation embedded in this expectation.”
“The presumption that a woman engages in intimacy only as a prelude to marriage, that her consent to one act is but a silent pledge to another, is a vestige of patriarchal thought, not a principle of justice,” the judge concluded. “The law cannot lend itself to such a perversion of choice, where failed relationships become grounds for legal redress, and disappointment is cloaked in the language of deception.”
